I feel like a lot of businesses are still unsure where to even start when it comes to performance monitoring, and as such, they never do. By demystifying it and breaking it down into three clear categories, each with their own distinct time, place, and purpose, it immediately takes a lot of the effort away from them: rather than worrying what their strategy should be, they now simply need to ask ‘Do we have one?’

I like that this introduction to React doesn’t assume any knowledge (or desire) to create an entire app from scratch through command line invocations. Instead, here’s a clear explanation of how you can add React—which is, after all, some JavaScript—to an existing project. Oh, and you can write your CSS in CSS.

(Caveat: because everything’s happening in script elements in the browser, what’s outlined here will only do client-side rendering.)

In my experience, there’s no casual mode within React. You need to be all-in, keeping up with the ecosystem, or else your knowledge evaporates.

I think Dave is right. At this point, it’s possible to be a React developer exclusively.

React is an ecosystem. I feel like it’s a disservice to anyone trying to learn to diminish all that React entails. React shows up on the scene with Babel, Webpack, and JSX (which each have their own learning curve) then quickly branches out into technologies like Redux, React-Router, Immutable.js, Axios, Jest, Next.js, Create-React-App, GraphQL, and whatever weird plugin you need for your app.

And, as Jake points out, you either need to go all in or not at all—you can’t really incrementally add Reactness to an existing project.

One thing I gained a stronger awareness of (simply from working with checkboxes) is that it’s important to progressively enhance UI components, so that a fancy custom one is able to fall back to the default browser styles and functionality. This way, a user can still access the UI if JavaScript or CSS fail.

Rather than copying bad examples from the history of native apps, where everything is delivered in one big lump, we should be doing a little with a little, then getting a little more and doing a little more, repeating until complete. Think about the things users are going to do when they first arrive, and deliver that. Especially consider those most-likely to arrive with empty caches.

And here’s a good way of thinking about that:

I’m a fan of progressive enhancement as it puts you in this mindset. Continually do as much as you can with what you’ve got.

All too often, saying “use the right tool for the job” is interpreted as “don’t use that tool!” but as Jake reminds us, the sign of a really good tool is its ability to adapt instead of demanding rigid usage:

Netflix uses React on the client and server, but they identified that the client-side portion wasn’t needed for the first interaction, so they leaned on what the browser can already do, and deferred client-side React. The story isn’t that they’re abandoning React, it’s that they’re able to defer it on the client until it’s was needed. React folks should be championing this as a feature.

Another deep dive into web history, this time on JavaScript. The timeline of JS on the web is retroactively broken down into four eras:

the early era: ~1996 – 2004,

the jQuery era: ~2004 – 2010,

the Single Page App era: ~2010 - 2014, and

the modern era: ~2014 - present.

Nice to see “vanilla” JavaScript making a resurgence in that last one.

It’s 2017, the JavaScript ecosystem is both thriving and confusing as all hell. No one seems to be quite sure where it’s headed, only that it’s going to continue to grow and change. The web’s not going anywhere, which means JS isn’t going anywhere, and I’m excited to see what future eras bring us.

Very clever stuff here from Jon in the tradition of Bret Victor—alter Sketch files by directly manipulating code (React, in this case).

I’m not sure the particular use-case outlined here is going to apply much outside of AirBnB (just because the direction of code-to-Sketch feels inverted from most processes) but the underlying idea of treating visual design assets and code as two manifestations of the same process …that’s very powerful.

Remy wants to be able to apply progressive enhancement to React: server-side and client-side rendering, sharing the same codebase. He succeeded, but…

In my opinion, an individual or a team starting out, or without the will, aren’t going to use progressive enhancement in their approach to applying server side rendering to a React app. I don’t believe this is by choice, I think it’s simply because React lends itself so strongly to client-side, that I can see how it’s easy to oversee how you could start on the server and progressive enhance upwards to a rich client side experience.

I’m hopeful that future iterations of React will make this a smoother option.

I haven’t made a website with React, but if and when I do, this Node.js framework looks like it aligns nicely with my priorities. It’s all about the universal JavaScript (the artist formerly known as isomorphic JavaScript).

I don’t use React. I don’t really gravitate towards larger frameworks, only because my daily work doesn’t require it, and I’m personally more interested in the lower level techniques and parts of the web and JavaScript.

But, like Remy, I’m interested in knowing what are the ideas and techniques embedded within large frameworks that will end up making their way into the web stack:

What I want to know is: what should I be taking away from React into my own continued evolution as a web developer?